<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/plastics-pollution-landmark-settlement-pennsylvania-styropek-nurdles/>
"When Heather Hulton VanTassel went looking for plastic pellets in the Ohio
River in 2021, she was simply trying to establish a baseline level of
contamination. A new plastics facility was being constructed nearby, and she
wanted to be able to compare the prevalence of pellets — known as “nurdles” —
before and after it went into operation. The “before” number would probably be
low, she thought.
What she and her co-workers found, however, exceeded her expectations. “We were
really shocked at the numbers we were seeing,” she told Grist.
VanTassel is the executive director of Three Rivers Waterkeeper, a nonprofit
that protects the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers in southwestern
Pennsylvania. As she and her team went about testing the river four years ago,
hundreds of nurdles were coming up in each sample they pulled with their
handheld trawls, a device about the size of a large shoebox. And the plastic
pieces were tiny — even more so than the five millimeter nurdles she was used
to. She had to add coffee filters to her catchment device to keep the particles
from slipping through its sieves.
VanTassel’s team kept following the pellets upstream, trawl after trawl, until
they eventually reached the Ohio River’s confluence with Raccoon Creek, a
popular area for swimming and fishing. That’s where they found the source. An
industrial stormwater pipe was transporting pellets from a Styropek plastics
facility and releasing them directly into the creek. The water testers could
see them flowing out “all over the vegetation,” VanTassel said, and deposited
in the soil just above the water line.
That finding became the catalyst for a legal battle that has just reached its
conclusion. Three Rivers Waterkeeper and the nonprofit PennEnvironment reached
a landmark settlement agreement with Styropek earlier this month, following a
lawsuit they filed against the company in 2023 over its contamination of the
Ohio River watershed.
The agreement, which also resolves a violation notice from the Pennsylvania
Department of Environmental Protection, requires Styropek to pay $2.6 million
to remediate its plastic pollution, and to fund clean water projects across the
state.
But what makes the settlement effective, according to the plaintiffs, is not
this initial penalty. It’s a requirement that Styropek must install technology
to detect the release of any more plastic pellets from its facility in Monaca,
Pennsylvania. If the technology finds even a single nurdle in the facility’s
stormwater outfalls, the company will have to pay up."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
